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How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks
There are plenty of destructive rodents similar to chipmunks near your house. Learning how to get rid of chipmunks is crucial nowadays. Chipmunks are amongst the most destructive and cuter rodents you will ever find. These tiny and striped rodents belong to Noth America and Asia.
These are basically omnivorous n nature, which clearly means they will feed on anything they get. From beneficial insects to bulbs and buds in your garden, chipmunks won’t leave anything behind. The worst thing about these rodents is that they run faster than lightning when they need to escape human traps, in such a scenario, how to get rid of chipmunks is a question we have been searching for lately.
They make underground burrows. When they are large in number, these burrows can even destabilize the foundation of your home and garden. Fortunately, we have come up with certain amazing ways and measures that you can use easily and learn how to get rid of chipmunks.
You can also discourage them to make a home in your, you just have to begin with simple and natural methods to prevent them and discourage them to make a home near your house.
It is important to get rid of chipmunks because sometimes they can even transmit diseases by acting as a carrier of certain diseases. These illness or diseases include:
- Colorado tick fever
- Plague
- Rabies
- Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The greatest thing to be worried about or be concerned about is chipmunks saliva as it transfers diseases through its saliva. Any area that has been bitten by a chipmunk should be checked properly by a doctor and adequate and appropriate treatment measures should be taken.
You can avoid getting infected by a chipmunk by following simple measures like never feeding rodents when you are in wild, not touching them when they are injured or dead, and by avoiding camping or rest near any animal burrows.
Let’s find out first that why do chipmunks keep visiting your place and what is it that you do to prevent them from coming.
Why Chipmunks Visit Your House
Your property or house becomes even more attractive and enticing to chipmunk attack when you have garden and terrain suits that attract them.
Chipmunks usually eat the food that grows in the gardens of your house. As already told above, they eat everything from green veggies to insects. They feed on fruits and seeds of various shrubs and trees. Your house might have many small reptiles, insects, amphibians, young birds, eggs, and other insects that attract them towards your property.
Another reason for them to stick around your location includes geographical features and the environment of your land. Chipmunks have the ability to dig their burrows in a wide range of locations such as woodlands, gardens, lawns, woodpiles, bushy areas, and parks. If your house is featuring similar sort of terrains, you might discover few burrows. Chipmunks not only keep digging their burrows in the ground, but they are also skilled climbers.
They are mostly found from Canada to Mexico.
Also, chipmunks tend to look for a habitat that would offer them covers. It can build its home in rural and wooded areas or developed areas having man-made settings. In summers their burrows will not be very deep but in winters they dig even more to store their food and keep themselves warm.
This burrow in the center of a chipmunk’s life and they will not move one-thrid of a mile far from this center. If you find a burrow near your house or garden, there are good chances you will be troubled by chipmunk issues pretty soon.
Different Damages Done By Chipmunks
In order to know how to get rid of chipmunks, you need to know what kind of damage they can cause once they have to build a burrow in your surroundings. The good news here is that these mammals are small and are not significant in doing greater damages. There are two ways they can cause damage, these include:
- near suburban or rural areas or houses, chipmunks choose to make their home or dig burrows near the patio, retention walls, foundation, or even the stairs. This will weaken the area and the support they provide.
- They are well known for devouring plants, fruits, vegetables, and digging flower bulbs. These things will eventually cause them to be a nuisance n the garden and to the gardeners. They are more likely to get tempted and eat pet food and bird seeds, make sure you are keeping them inside your house if you already spotted few chipmunks near your house.
Let’s see how to get rid of chipmunks and how to prevent them from making a home or burrow in your property.
How To Prevent Chipmunks From Making Home
Preventing chipmunks from digging burrows in your garden or near your house is much easier than removing them later on. You should continue following the measures listed below even after you have spotted a chipmunk nearby as they are highly useful in preventing them from making a home again near your house.
Follow these steps:
Step one: Building A Fence
Excluding chipmunks from the yard or preventing them to enter is the best way and probably the first way you should try in order to stop them from creating a house. You may use any hardware cloth or a wire mesh to create a perimeter all around the plants grown in your garden region.
Remember that simple fencing will not keep them away from your enticing veggies or fruits, while you are creating a fence make sure it is at least 8 inches deep inside the ground as chipmunks are great when it comes to digging burrows, they will enter from the ground route if you do not dig it too deeply.
Step Two: Seal The Home
They usually do not intend to get inside your house unless they smell something that feels attractive to them, however, due to their very small size, they can venture inside the house anytime. They would not even think twice before messing around with all the food items in your house.
To avoid all the mess, you have to take initiative by sealing your house and make it chipmunk-free. If your windows or door have any sort of cracks or open spaces in between, try to seal them using plastic or rubber as soon as you can. Tiny holes on the side of your house are also dangerous since chipmunks are small enough to fit inside them and enter your home. Using caulk and expandable construction foam, just cover these cracks or holes. You can also use concrete to bury the holes.
Chipmunks might also enter through natural openings that are mandatory for your house including chimneys, pipes, and vents. When you are already seeing few chipmunks near your house, it is important to take measures. Cover these openings using any type of small mesh so that it does the function of ventilation along with preventing chipmunks to enter inside.
Step Three: Take Help From Your Pets
Your dogs and cats love playing around with small rodents like mice and chipmunks. They love catching them and running around them for fun. Letting your pet outside for few minutes can help you with preventing chipmunks to enter. Even if your pet is not likely to hunt them down and kill them, their presence outside in front of chipmunks can serve the purpose of scaring them enough so that they will runoff.
Cats have been popular to present their owners with anything they catch either dead or alive. This is no less than a nightmare to deal with dead chipmunks if your cat brings them home.
Let’s proceed towards some treatment measure on how to get rid of chipmunks that you can use easily if you have noticed a lot of chipmunks in your area lately.
How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks
If you have a large garden full of vegetation you are likely to notice gnaw marks or dug-up flower bulbs in presence of chipmunks. Chipmunks are not letting birds eat bird feeders or seeds you have poured in your garden as they will finish off everything before birds enter.
You can notice that their burrow holes will not be larger than two inches. Also, chipmunks would not be creating ridges or mounds around the burrows. So the chipmunk burrows are less destructive and noticeable than burrows created by other rodents like voles or moles. However, these burrows can cause serious damage if the chipmunks are able to dig these burrows deep beneath your house or the foundation of your buildings.
Let’s see some measures to prevent them from doing so.
1. How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks By Keeping The Yard Clean
The first step that can help you with how to get rid of chipmunks is cleaning the yard. You have to eliminate all the feeding and nesting opportunities that chipmunks might use to create their home. This is very important both as a preventive measure and a strategy to get rid of them. Let’s see what you have to do to carry out this process efficiently.
- Since the chipmunks are known to feed on all sorts of fruits and veggies, you can pick your fruiting trees or bushes once they have ripened fully.
- You have to quickly rake up all the fallen fruits and vegetables once they have ripened and dropped on the ground before chipmunks notice them and collect them in their burrows.
- While using bird feeders, make sure you are bringing bird feeders that are not easy for chipmunks or squirrels to get into.
- Chipmunks usually love to burrow and seek shelter in areas that can provide coverage from predators like shrubs, trees, tall grasses, piles of leaves, logs, and brush piles. Monitor your yard to find out if there are any burrows near such areas. Try to reduce the coverage places where chipmunks can seek shelter.
2. How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks By Setting Traps
If you have spotted only 2 or 3 chipmunks in your area, then setting traps to catch them can be a really useful idea on how to get rid of chipmunks. If there are a larger number of chipmunks available in your area, then this method would not be ideal as it would not guarantee that other chipmunks will keep away from your property.
To eradicate or get rid of chipmunks, you will have to pair the trappings with some other methods like fencing and repellants that can together be useful in getting rid of chipmunks.
I live trap involves a one-way door or spring-loaded door. Since chipmunks are of the same size as few other rodents like rats and mice, you may also use some pre-existing traps inside your house that you previously used for these critters including rat traps. These traps involve a snap-down bar designed especially for getting rid of rodents.
There are associated pros and cons to every type of trap you have seen. A live trap is considered to be more ethical and humane, given that you remove the chipmunk out of it before it dies or gets hurt badly. This method is good but it possess a risk for those who haven’t done this before. When chipmunks are hurt, they are frightened and can cause harm to you if you try to remove them. They might also transfer some diseases that they are carrying.
Other types of traps are snap traps but they are not considered humane and ethical as they kill the chipmunk on the spot. Keep in mind to contact a professional if you wish to set traps. If you have not come across any such issues prior to this time, you must consult a professional to seek help. Let’s see how can you use chipmunk traps.
How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks Using Traps
- First of all, you need to check your local and state regulations to see if there are any rules and limitations on trapping chipmunks or other rodents. Many places have strict laws on killing rodents, make sure you check your area.
- Read the instructions given on the label to know how to set the trap appropriately for its use.
- You may bait the trap using some nuts, seeds, or fruits that chipmunks like. If you are not sure which bait to use, you can pay attention to what the chipmunk has been eating for few days in your yard.
- Set this trap close to the chipmunks’ burrow to keep them easy to catch. Make sure you are keeping it in the morning when they just come out of their burrow.
- Check the trap every other day to find out if a chipmunk is trapped inside it or not. You need to have patience while practicing the procedure.
Some Tips To Keep In Mind:
- When you set these traps, your pets might also enter the trap and get hurt, for preventing this, cut a hole inside cardboard that is large enough for only the chipmunk to enter inside and not your pets. Keep this over the trap.
- Peanut butter is an excellent bait for catching chipmunks as they love the smell of nuts and will get attracted towards the trap you have set without being knocked off.
3. How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks Using Repellants
If you wish to know how to get rid of chipmunks using repellants it is important to know that repellants are not enough to fight chipmunks alone. They will act as an additional step and help you wish chipmunk issues and will make your yard less enticing or appealing for chipmunks and other rodents to enter.
The smell of these repellants is so strong that once you spray them or use them anyhow on the perimeter or circumference of your backyard or house near the vegetation, the chipmunks will stay away.
However, these repellants will not last for many days, they will eventually wash out and the smell will not be effective in keeping chipmunks away. Even if they are still there, the smell will become quite familiar to the chipmunks and they will get used to it. These factors make it extremely necessary to use a different insect repellant every time and keep switching, again and again, to keep the critters away.
Mostly the store-bought repellants we receive are in form of liquid or in form of granules. These repellants have natural substances that help to keep chipmunks away from their strong smell. They also include traces of predators’ urine and some essential oils. The urine of predators is a very strong ingredient and is highly effective in keeping chipmunks away because they will be scared to visit anywhere near your property from the fear of being eaten by prey like foxes and coyotes.
4. How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks Using Spicy Spray
Whenever we eat spicy food, we often experience some symptoms like mouth pain, watering eyes, or coughing. These symptoms are the same in chipmunks too when you spray something spicy onto them or they come in direct contact with something spicy.
Spicy peppers such as chili paper or cayenne pepper are both highly effective and non-toxic to vegetation in your garden. You can easily spray these sprays on plants so that the chipmunks cannot consume them. In this way, you will not be seeing them around for too long.
If you do not wish to invest in these pepper sprays, you can just DIY your own pepper spray and learn how to get rid of chipmunks using that. All you have to do is add crushed peppers or any hot sauce to a small spray bottle and then fill it using water. You can store it to be used for another chipmunk attach to your vegetables and fruits.
5. How To Get Rod Of Chipmunks Using Mothballs
You might have heard a lot about mothballs and their repellant properties. Some of you have also used them quite often, you might be thinking about how to get rid of chipmunks using mothballs as they are for moths. Do not worry, we have the answer.
In the same way, you use mothballs to repel moths in your surrounding, they can also be used to repel chipmunks due to their odor and material composition. You can easily place or drop these mothballs on the perimeter of your property so that chipmunks do not enter the area.
6. How To Get Rid Of Chipmunks Using Predators
How to get rid of chipmunks or make them run away using other animals? This is another great idea to go for. There are plenty of birds that prey and feed on chipmunks and they can easily scoop the chipmunks from the ground.
If you wish to get a permanent solution that is completely natural to get rid of chipmunks you may try introducing some predators in your property. For example, you can introduce owls as they are known to be the best hunters of chipmunks. If your house or garden has some other rodents similar to chipmunks, the owl will be excellent to remove them. To encourage and increase the number of owls in your area, just invest in some boxes that can be used as nests for owls.
Let’s see how to create one on your own. Using plywood and nails, nail together a box having dimensions 38*18*12. Cut out a hole for the entrance of dimensions 6*6. Place this box high up on any tree and wait for owls to make it their home.
When To Seek Help From A Professional
If you still have not figured out how to get rid of chipmunks or the methods have not been very effective for the long term, you can seek help from professionals. A professional exterminator will use some standardized treatment and inspection plans that help you meet all the needs.
They will help you in locating the burrows of chipmunks and let you know if these burrows will cause any potential harm to your property. The professionals will also offer you targeted plans and methods that you can practice along with their guidance and easily know how to get rid of chipmunks.
These were some amazing techniques and methods you can incorporate to get rid of chipmunks and prevent them from causing any harm in the future.
If you are facing challenges and problems regarding ladybugs and wish to learn methods and techniques to get rid of them too, use these 10 tips and measures that will actually work.
